News Coverage
Library Journal, March 23, 2023
New Academic Librarian Survey Offers Perspectives on AI in Higher Ed
Many academic librarians believe context matters when artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT are used by students and faculty to assist with their work, according to “AI in Higher Education: The Librarians’ Perspectives,” a recent survey of 125 librarians published this month by Helper Systems. While only eight percent of respondents said that they believe it is cheating when students use AI products for research—compared with 49 percent who said it was not—42 percent said that it was “somewhat” cheating.
University World News, March 18, 2023
University librarians are divided over AI use and ethics – Survey
A survey of 125 university librarians across the United States has discovered wildly differing opinions on the use and morality of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT in higher education. Only 13% of surveyed academic libraries offer AI products to researchers, and 24% are considering this.
Press Release – March 13, 2023
Media Contact: Tish Wagner (tish@helpersystems.com)
50% of Librarians Do Not Believe Students Who Use AI are Cheating
Helper Systems’ Survey is Now Available at helpersystems.com
March 13, 2023, Helper, Utah – To better understand librarians’ viewpoints on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education, Helper Systems, a company that is striving to make information easier to find, manage and use, conducted a survey of more than 125 academic librarians in the United States.
The survey results are freely available, with no registration, here.
Among other key findings:
- When asked if they believe it is cheating when students use AI products, just 8% indicated a definitive “no.”
- In comparison, 12% said AI is unethical for professors to use for research and 14% for professionals to use on the job.
- Major concerns regarding AI in higher education include eliminating or reducing critical thinking and originality, cheating, and the loss of human jobs.
“…Students learn how to punch a calculator for math. Now they learn how to run ChatGPT to write a paper. They use Refworks to create citations. We are educating intelligent youngsters towards dummies,” wrote one participant.
“(AI products) are a potential game-changer in the way that the introduction of Google changed the research process. Too many libraries missed the boat in using Google, opposing it rather than endorsing and utilizing it. I do not get the impression that is occurring with the new AI resources,” countered another.
According to Christopher Warnock, Helper’s Founder and CEO, the company designed the survey specifically for librarians for many reasons. Warnock explained that librarians play a pivotal role in higher education and student success, and are key to the identification and adoption of innovative new technologies.
“Librarians are awesome,” said Warnock.
About Helper Systems (helpersystems.com)
Awarded “Most Impactful New Company” at the renowned 2022 Charleston Conference, Helper Systems develops software that makes information easier to discover and organize and a lot more fun to use. Helper Systems’ first product, kOS (pronounced “chaos”) 1.0, enables macOS users to easily discover information hidden within their PDFs. Now available in the App Store, kOS 1.0 is free to anyone and runs on a user’s desktop, protecting their privacy. Helper Systems is based in Helper, Utah, with employees in California, Ukraine and Serbia. For more information visit helpersystems.com.
Press Release – February 14, 2023
Media Contact: Tish Wagner (tish@helpersystems.com)
Helper Systems Launches kOS 1.0 Preview
Free app makes information in PDFs easier to discover and a lot more fun to use
February 14, 2023, Helper, Utah – Startup Helper Systems has launched a preview of its first app that makes it easier and a lot more fun to discover and use information in PDFs. kOS (pronounced “chaos”) turns any PDFs that reside on users’ desktops or cloud drives into powerful databases that are easy to navigate. kOS also includes tools that promote discovery of new concepts and ideas including a Word Cloud and Occurrences. The preview is freely available to everyone via TestFlight, Apple’s development management system.
kOS 1.0 is an essential tool for anyone who works with PDFs. Everyone from students, professors and knowledge workers who need to do research more efficiently to legal, government and corporate employees who need a better way to discover and manage contracts, invoices, patents, and any other documents in PDF format can benefit from kOS.
The kOS 1.0 preview runs on a user’s macOS laptop or desktop, protecting privacy and ensuring they never lose access to data that is important to them.
“kOS 1.0 is amazing! Where has this been all my life? I’m dumbstruck,” said Alastair Williams, Professor of History, Humanities & Social Sciences at Clarkson University. “The ability to utilize kOS across multiple PDFs at once will boost research productivity hugely in terms of saving time and easily finding and exploring information…kOS is exactly what my field needs at this point in digital life.”
“PDF documents have more utility than most people experience. We are excited to launch software that introduces these features to make information easier to discover and, more importantly, work with file sets as opposed to individual documents,” said Christopher Warnock, Helper System’s CEO and Founder. “We are extremely thankful to our alpha testers and everyone who has contributed to the launch of our first preview of kOS.”
About Helper Systems (helpersystems.com)
Awarded “Most Impactful New Company” at the renowned 2022 Charleston Conference, Helper Systems develops software that makes information easier to discover and organize and a lot more fun to use. Helper Systems is based in Helper, Utah, with employees in California, Ukraine and Serbia. For more information visit helpersystems.com.
Information Today, November 29, 2022
New Company Helper Systems Shows Researchers How to Tame the Information Glut
The PDF is likely to remain the standard tool for preserving scholarly information. A program such as kOS will give users the ability to give added value to their research and will surely find a home with scholars around the world.
Read Terry Ballard’s article on kOS and Helper Systems in Information Today NewsBreaks
The Charleston Conference, November 29, 2022
Helper Systems Awarded “Most Impactful” at the Charleston Conference
Press Release – November 1, 2022
Media Contact: Tish Wagner (tish@helpersystems.com)
Startup Helper Systems Aims to Help the Information Industry Thrive
November 1, 2022, Helper, Utah — A motley crew of library and publishing industry experts and aficionados, musicians, artists, vintners, Ukrainian freedom fighters, engineers, firefighters and robot builders have launched Helper Systems and aim to change the information landscape forever. Their goal is to make the world’s information easier to find, manage and comprehend, and a lot more fun to use.
Since co-founding ebrary, one of the first ebook companies in 1999, Helper Systems’ CEO Christopher Warnock has been working with friends and colleagues to innovate a software application that enables people to create highly interactive databases of multimedia files stored on their cloud or local hard drives, ensuring privacy. Called kOS (pronounced chaos), the new software provides tools for unprecedented indexing, searching, annotating, and managing information along with other features that enable faster and easier comprehension of large data sets. Helper’s first products, which will launch this winter, are focused on PDF files and will initially be for macOS users only.
“PDF has some interesting capabilities that are unknown and not being leveraged,” said Warnock. “When used to its full potential, the PDF file format can provide some really big gains in terms of creating, finding, presenting and navigating information, with the added benefit of preserving the heritage of the printed document.”
“I use PDFs a lot, and most of the applications that I use for PDFs are cumbersome at best. kOS makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. I’m very intrigued.” – Dr. Kevin Wehr, Professor of Sociology, CSU Sacramento.
“I want KOS now! Every student in America will want KOS.” -James Wiser, Dean of Library Services & Educational Technology, Abilene Christian University and Doctoral Candidate at University of Texas
Helper is debuting kOS at the Charleston Conference, Nov. 1-3 in Charleston, SC. The team believes its software will greatly benefit both librarians and publishers and create synergies between them. Helper is seeking input. Anyone interested in participating in a focus group or demo should visit helpersystems.com.
About Helper Systems (helpersystems.com)
Based in and named after Helper, Utah, we are a motley crew of library and publishing industry experts and aficionados, musicians, artists, vintners, Ukrainian freedom fighters, engineers, firefighters and robot builders who all have the same goal: Making the world’s information easy to find and manage, quick to comprehend, and fun to use.
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